We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway.
We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway. At an appropriate season, starlets and cameramen cluster in Cannes. Canny financiers ‘sell in May and go away’. And invariably at a weekend around the time of the 2,000 Guineas I retreat to my study with a bottle of good malt, the floppy Raceform weekly formbook and Timeform’s latest chunky little bible, this year the Racehorses of 2005 (£70, post free, from Timeform, 25 Timeform House, Halifax, West Yorkshire HX1 1XF), in an attempt to find a few winners for the Flat racing season, a season which I refuse to take seriously until the time of the first Classic. So here goes with Ten To Follow between now and November.
At former footballer Mick Channon’s stable before the Guineas, as we watched his Flashy Wings on the gallops, somebody asked the great man if he had ever fancied being England manager instead. ‘No,’ came the answer right away. ‘Horses don’t answer you back.’
He is far too good at training horses to consider anything else for a moment. The old yard, which used to belong to the Queen and from which Major Dick Hern sent out so many big winners, has been beautifully restored and has a real bustle about it. That first Classic still eludes Mick Channon — the ground went against Flashy Wings on 1,000 Guineas day — but year on year the quality improves. ‘Until the past couple of years,’ he says, ‘I didn’t have a horse which would get one and a half miles on a bus.’ But this year he has at least three possible Derby hopes in the likes of Championship Point, Hazymm and Youmzain.
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